What the Dickens?

Day 301 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and a bunch of television viewers will now be reading Dickens, because, as Border's tells us, it's the new Oprah Book Club pick.  Just in time for Christmas!

Evidently they will be reading A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, bound as one?  Or not?  I'm not sure, as when you click the Buy Now button, it says "no image available," but this image is available.

Anyhoo, Dickens is great fun.  And 'tis the season for Dickens, too.

Another list, the 2010 list from Lemon Hound.

Books inspired by Alice in Wonderland, via Chicago Sun-Times.

Ditto the source, books about Hanukkah, for kids.  (I also wrote about a vintage Hanukkah book at work today.)

A young woman got 33 books for her dad for Christmas, in the Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe mystery series.

And I just read Figure Studies, a book of poems by Claudia Emerson, because I need to return it to the person I borrowed it from.  Wonderful.  And I loved her books Pinion and Late Wife, too.  Figure Studies accomplishes a quiet feminism somehow, by examining life in a school for girls and speaking in a community voice--the "we" voice--in the "Gossips" section, which is not so gossipy as to lack compassion.  The epigraph for that section is from "A Rose for Emily," by William Faulkner, famous for its "we" voice.

Plus, this book mentions Atticus Finch in a poem!  My hero!  And Harper Lee in an epigraph, speaking as Dill: "I'm little but I'm old."

A Study in Scarlet

Day 59 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project.

Tim is reading volume one of a paperback edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. He is reading the stories because he liked the new (2009) Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, directed by Guy Ritchie. (This, I hear, is the edgy, cynical, martial arts version of Sherlock Holmes, and great fun.)

Tim read “The Hound of the Baskervilles” in high school and didn’t like it so much. At that age, he preferred Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But he is loving reading the Conan Doyle stories now, starting at the beginning with A Study in Scarlet, which first appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a popular magazine, in 1887. Not too many copies of this very, very valuable issue remain. (Hmm, a mystery plot has popped into my head, involving the theft and attempted sale of one of the remaining copies!)

Tim was surprised to recall that we meet Holmes through Dr. Watson, who has been in Afghanistan during the British military occupation and returns “thin as a lath and brown as a nut.” What a coincidence, said Tim, to find Afghanistan in this novel as well as the news, but, indeed, history repeats itself, with variations. (Wait till Tim gets to the part about Mormons in Utah; that may seem surreal.)

Like Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle first published in the magazines. Some of the Sherlock Holmes stories are truly short stories, and some are full novels, published serially. “The Hound of the Baskervilles” was first published in The Strand Magazine, August, 1901 through April, 1902. The Strand went out of publication in 1950—the usual budgetary woes—but, delightfully, as of 1998, is back! How many of you mystery fans read it?

I’m struck by a sentence from A Study in Scarlet, related to its title: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

This is intriguing in several ways:

A working title for A Study in Scarlet was A Tangled Skein.

The skein is “colourless” without the thread of murder, as if life is boring without the threat of its loss at the hands of another, or the thrill of this happening to someone else…which may help account for the avid reading of murder mysteries if not, perhaps, the persistence of murder itself…which seems to have other sources & motives than relief from boredom or the need for a shudder while safe in an armchair.

The duty to unravel and expose the scarlet thread was Conan Doyle’s own passion, as he exposed injustice in some real life cases as well as his fictions. This, too--a longing for justice--helps explains why many people prefer murder mysteries, where the killer is usually caught and justice can prevail, to true crime, or the news, where the truth does not always come out, and injustice sometimes goes unpunished. Not all murder mysteries tie up neatly and let goodness prevail...but "cozy" ones do. (More on that another time.)

I return to “the colourless skein of life” and imagine as well an invisible strand of melancholy in Conan Doyle, saddened by the loss of various loved ones and interested in spiritualism as well as justice and detective fiction.

More on true crime, In Cold Blood (previous entry), and categories of murder mystery…to come.

A Tale of Two Cities

Day 36 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Candace is reading a book about corn.

And I think I know why. There is a permanent Agriculture exhibit at the museum where she works, and a new exhibit on food & music in the planning, and the Farmers Market will be coming in the summer, and, eventually, lots of corn. And local poets will read poems about corn and farming and food and folk music at the museum sometime this summer. I will announce it here, no doubt. And I have corn earrings.

Late in the summer we have the annual Corn Festival, which used to be in one of our twin cities and is now in the other. A corny transition....

...to a Tale for Two Cities, a local event like The Big Read in towns and cities all over the USA, in which people in our particular twin cities read the same book, and the two public libraries offer multiple copies of it and a series of book-related events.

This year's mutual read in our two cities is: Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference by Warren St. John. We will meet the author, hear experts speak on a variety of topics, meet some Lost Boys of Sudan, and see the movies Bend It Like Beckham, The Cup, God Grew Tired of Us, Kicking It, and War Dance.

Yes, this is a book about soccer! And people! And the world! Ongoing wars and conflicts, the plight of refugees. And small-town America. I started loving it from the introduction, which contrasts the coaching styles of a silent coach who respects her players and lets them play and a "screamer," and I hope my husband will read it, too, as he's a coach and not a screamer.

Meanwhile, Chicago is reading Brooklyn by Colm Toibin for the One Book, One Chicago program, and this is something I'll hope to read in the future. I enjoyed his novel The Master, in the style of Henry James. (But whenever I hear "the Master," I think of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of my favorite books ever, but one my mom could not finish....She gets impatient with fantasy, so she was probably annoyed when the Devil came to Moscow.)

So now I have mentioned more than two cities: Chicago, Moscow, and our twin cities of Bloomington-Normal (via the library & museum links).

And lest Charles Dickens feel neglected for no real reference to A Tale of Two Cities, I will link for him here to Amazon, add an image because I like the lilies of the valley on this particular cover, and remind us that this whole daily book blog thing began with everybody reading Dickens. And, hey, young man came into Babbitt's yesterday in search of Dickens and found some, leaving happy! And if you too are addicted to books, you will be happy to greet spring at the Normal Public Library book sale this weekend!

What the Dickens are you reading?

So today I am starting my "What are you reading?" project in earnest. Two people are reading Charles Dickens: Sarah is reading Oliver Twist and Ron is reading Pickwick Papers. I am hoping they will come here eventually and comment on why they are reading these particular books at this particular time, but for now I will just riff a little on all this.

First off, I will probably do informal research on the authors and books in that wonderful place we tell students not to use in their research papers: Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia as a first place to look for info, because it gathers it all up in a lively way. For real research, Iwould follow it all up in other sources, but for this blog...well, we'll see. I'd like to think of the book itself and the people who are reading it as my main sources. I want to know what you are reading, and why.

Secondly, I want to write about what people are reading as hard copy, in print sources, to track how that's going. I love all the info available on the Internet and I read both print and online literary journals, newspapers, magazine articles, etc., and links people send me. But I work in a bookstore, and I like to see what people want to hold in their hands to read! What they want to keep forever, or bring back and trade in, etc. I am interested in the state of reading, in a general way, to better understand those scary statistics about the decline of reading, and in the specific way of who is still reading hard copy/print media, and why. And, more specifically, books, hardcover or softcover.

Thirdly, I work in a used bookstore. I love books, and I buy some new, at the big bookstores, and at Amazon.com when I have a coupon and/or a desperate need. Otherwise, I buy my books cheap, used, where I work, with my employee discount of 20%. (Yesterday I bought Unless by Carol Shields, paperback, and Letters to a Fiction Writer, edited by Frederick Busch, hardcover, first edition, first printing. I am a book addict.) (I have read Busch's introduction so far, about a crappy rejection letter he got, and about more generous letters since, and the first letter, by Lee K. Abbott to his son, who also wants to be a writer. The thrilling thing there is that Abbott tells his son what I have heard from other writers, too: you have to go deep, and tell them everything you think, feel, and know about life. Permission to tell!)

On the one hand, I am troubled by this (buying used, not the book addict thing; I accept my book addiction): the author is not getting a royalty. On the other hand, I know authors want to be read. Many authors are generous and want their books to be passed from hand to hand, resold so the less affluent can afford to read/keep a book, donated to the library book sale, so both the reader and the library benefit, etc. A used bookstore is also a form of recycling. (And, literally, a too-damaged book is one we do recycle locally; for hardcovers, we remove the cover and recycle the textblock. And then I look for an artistic use of the hardcover, as well.) So there are my confessions, disclosures, hopes.

Pickwick Papers was, according to Wikipedia, Dickens's first complete novel. I don't think I've read it. Dickens is the guy who often composed/published his work serially, with readers waiting eagerly for the next installment. I miss that! But Harper's Magazine serialized Happyland by J. Robert Lennon a short while back. (He has a website, a literary blog, etc. You can start here to learn more about him: http://www.jrobertlennon.com/) (Oops, straying wildly from the hard copy/print media focus already, but, hey Harper's a a print magazine, and that's where I read Happyland.) I have read other Dickens novels, and recently watched Little Dorrit on PBS, online. (Ditto. Sigh.) Anyway, my life has been entwined with Dickens. I have fond memories of sitting in the theatre for the marathon performance of Nicholas Nickleby in Chicago and having muffins thrown at me! I read David Copperfield in my teens, and likewise Oliver Twist.

My first experience of Oliver Twist, however, was Oliver, the musical. The film. I was young enough to have been shocked by the darkness in it, that a character we come to know and love actually dies. Even though it was a musical, not everything worked out. And Fagin in the book is much darker than he is in the musical, or than he is, of course, in the Disney adaption, Oliver and Company, which I viewed with my children. The character Fagin was based on a real man named Fagin. It's no surprise that Dickens based many characters on people he'd seen, known, worked with, or was related to in life.

Dickens is one of those writers who delves deep into family--exploring good relationships, troubled ones, various kinds of love and loyalty. By coincidence--or is it synchronicity?--I am reading the essay "Family" in The Death of Adam right now. And here's something I want to mention about my little "What are you reading?" project. I have noticed that I read just the right thing at just the right time, which is coincidental, not supernatural, but everything else I read/notice at the time connects. I think this is because I am attentive and see the connections, and because they are there. We read and write our shared human experience.

Sometimes I put a book down. Usually this is not the writer's fault. If I take up a book that someone has recommended to me, and I can't get into, it may be a matter of taste and preference, yes, and I may not take up that book again, but mostly likely, in my case, it is simply not the right time for me to be attentive to that particular book. Two close reader friends, with whom I am in a book group, have recommended to me A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, as one of their favorite books of all time. Three times I tried to read it. My husband, not as avid a reader as I am, read it before I did. But I did complete it last year, and, indeed, it is a wonderful book, a book that lives in me now, that taught me about the Vietnam War, and that spead my compassion wide and deepened my awe at the mystery of life.

So tell me what you are reading, and why. And let me know if you, too, experience that right-book-at-the-right-time phenomenon.